Building automation systems are used in buildings to manage energy systems, HVAC systems, irrigation systems, accessory building systems, controllable building structures, and the like.
There has been little effort toward incorporating these systems into a controller with a unified operational model, thus allowing a more intelligent means of managing the energy interrelationships between various building components and their respective control algorithms. This is due, in part, to the fact that the field has been dominated by model-free control loops, which have difficulty managing sophisticated, tightly-coupled systems or adaptively tuning complex models in a predictable manner.
There have been studies exploring the concept of automated commissioning, however the methods used to date have typically required an occupancy-free training period, during which the building is subjected to an artificial test regime, which limits the potential for retro-commissioning or continuous commissioning. More importantly, the work to date has been limited to simple HVAC systems having topologies known a priori, and lacks the ability to scale to complex ad hoc arrangements that represent the diversity of building topologies. In addition, the existing approaches lack a method of combined commissioning of non-HVAC or climate-adaptive energy interactive building components.
Efforts towards closed-loop control system auto-commissioning and optimization have been limited. Most efforts in the area of auto-commissioning have focused on a specific problem set, for example VAV commissioning, or air handler commissioning. The majority of the efforts to date have focused on manual commissioning through user analysis of building automation system data, user-driven computer tools for management of the commissioning process, commissioning test routines, or fault detection.
Recently, the most common approach in the industry has been to focus on building and energy monitoring and analytics with the intent of providing an energy “dashboard” for the building. The most sophisticated examples of dashboards provide statistical based diagnostics of equipment behavior changes, failures, or the like. This “outside-the-box-looking-in” approach can provide information, but relies on the administrator to understand the problem and close the loop, both of which are rare occurrences.
Efforts to date have used physical models as a reference, and benchmark the reference against the actual building using data mining to create control strategies. This requires a person in the loop, and thus limits applicability to projects with means for a highly skilled engineering team. It further requires buildings to be tested off-line, which is rarely acceptable.
Almost all building controls today are model-free. The model-free approach, while simple to implement, becomes quite difficult to manage and optimize as the complexity of the system increases. It also lacks the inherent self-knowledge to provide new approaches to programming, such as model-driven graphical programming, or govern the interconnections between components and sub-system synergistics.
Physical model based approaches to date have been limited in scope and specific to known models defined a-priori. They have thus lacked the ability to enable users to create n-complex systems of interconnected sub-systems by ad hoc means, use simple graphical user interfaces to define a system, or enable system model to evolve their control optimization and commissioning over time in situ.